Affiliate Marketing Plunge II: Day 8

June 13, 2008 Posted by Tyler Cruz

Before I begin, I’d like to remind everyone of the Affiliate Marketing Challenge I launched two days ago. There is an 8GB iPod Touch, Mino Flip Video Camera, $200 Market Leverage Rewards Amex Card, and a 2.0GB USB Pen up for grabs, so this contest shouldn’t be ignored.

MarketLeverage has been phoning all of the applicants to the competition who signed up under my blog to introduce themselves and to find out a bit more information about you so they can hook you up with related offers. While not everybody got their application accepted, most did, and some applications are still pending approval (which should be taken care of tomorrow).

So far, 16 publishers have registered and are competing in the competition. Currently, only two publishers have generating any sales (it’s only been a day, after all) which means that at this point, all you need to do is earn $0.01 to be in 3rd place. Participant CD8065 takes an early lead with $7.00 in sales, we’ll have to see how long he can secure 1st place.

For E-mail and RSS subscribers to my blog, you should know that I’ve added a ranking list to the top right of my blog which shows the current standings. Only the top four will be listed, but will give you a good idea on what you need to hit in order to stay in contention for one of the great prizes.

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It’s not too late to enter.. in fact, the contest doesn’t end until July 11th so you still have plenty of time to participate. Full competition details of the Affiliate Marketing Challenge can be found here.

My Plunge, Take II

Long-time readers of my blog may remember how a year ago (13 months to be exact) I tried my hand at PPC affiliate marketing for the first time.

For two weeks I struggled to make things work but in the end I failed miserably, losing $927.70 with an ROI of negative 78.21%. It was a good learning experience though, and I don’t regret my trying it.

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Last week, I decided to try my hand at PPC affiliate marketing again. It’s amazing how much time it takes… although a lot of it is spent on reading up on everything.

There is sooooooo much to learn to this game that it isn’t funny. And a lot has changed in the 13 months since I last tried my hand at it.

I started by opening up a subscription at WordZe. WordZe is a great keyword analysis and generation tool, and costs $35 a month.

I then created landing pages for offers I chose. I decided to choose completely different niches from the ones I tried last year. Last year I jumped into the most competitive and saturated markets possible… I knew I was at the time but wanted to see what would happen… it was my first time after all so I really just wanted to get into the routine of how the whole thing worked anyway.

I actually created landing pages out of my forums custom skins. I then customized vBulletin code so that I can split-test various landing pages and to send out multiple tracking variables (network, keyword, landing page, ad copy, etc.). It’s pretty powerful as I can create a basic template, add it into the queue, and my system will rotate it around with the other landing pages and dynamically fill in the offers and tracking variables. I’m surprised I was able to fiddle enough with PHP to make my little custom set-up as I have absolutely zero knowledge about PHP.

The benefit of my idea of using my existing related forums for landing page versus creating a custom landing site or “blank” landing page template is that PPC traffic I drive over who don’t end up turning into leads may end up registering on my forums or clicking one of the other related ads. However, the landing page on the forums is certainly designed to pre-sell them onto the main offer I’m promoting.

Anyhow, I started by promoting my first offer, which didn’t do well at all, not making a single conversion. I paused it for a while then resumed it last night after lowing my bids and taking it off the content network on AdWords.

I tried running another offer which had 1 conversion, but it didn’t do too well either.

My 3rd offer is the one I’m concentrating on at the moment. As of yesterday, I made $178.50 with it, but spent a lot more overall, putting me in the red. However, you’ll notice how yesterday was my first day in the green ever!

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Last year, I finished with an average ROI of -78.21%, and so my goal this time around is to improve on that – preferably break even. I know that sounds like a ludicrous goal, but it’s a big improvement over such a negative ROI.

After my first week time time around, I’m now at -57.12% ROI, which is already an improvement over last year. I also had my first day in the green yesterday which makes me very optimistic.

How did I achieve that? Basically, I removed the content network on my campaign for my 3rd offer and lowered the bids by around 50%.

I’ve been keeping a close eye on what keywords are generating conversions and today I found a possible goldmine keyword. Check this out:

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$7.65 EPC! Now, granted 10 clicks is a very small sample size, but it leaves my very optimistic because this keyword is a pretty generic 2-word that is of a site/related-niche of my campaign. This means I can now break down this keyword into a bunch of related keywords and see what those bring me.

My landing page is also not built for that keyword, meaning I can definitely improve on the conversion rate.

Stay tuned to see if I can turn my overall profit into the green!

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment below, subscribing to my RSS feed, or following me on Twitter.
Posted: June 13th, 2008 under Affiliate Marketing  

14 Responses to “Affiliate Marketing Plunge II: Day 8”

  1. Joey Logano says:

    Have you ever tried wordtracker? How do you feel it performs vs WordZe?

  2. shafi says:

    I’m also , trying to do some Affiliate marketing. I currently use adwords. Man cost per click of the niche is expensive. Maybe i should use yahoo.com

    chat at shafi[@11]mail2engineer.com msn

  3. Tim says:

    Tyler, Do you know who is what publisher? I am curious if they give you the names of the people?

    Tim

  4. Nice Great Conversions Keep it up Tyler Great Post

  5. stumps256 says:

    Great post. Thanks.

  6. I knew it wasn’t as easy as everyone preached, thanks for the truth Tyler 🙂

  7. firewire says:

    your doing great at testing the niches your way. I’m sure you’ll find the right formula soon enough.

  8. EntreBlast says:

    Good luck! And about the contest- should be interesting to track the competition from the sidebar!

  9. zach says:

    Wow, I love you blog, I have really learned a lot from reading all of your posts. I subscribed to your feed, and I look forward to continually reading quality posts. Maybe when you get a chance you could check out my blog.

    thanks,
    Zach The 12 year old business man.

  10. Andrew says:

    Hey Tyler,

    If you are doing Adwords, you should never turn on the Content network, at least in the same campaign that you are using designed for the Search network.

    If you’re really going to get into Adwords, I HIGHLY recommend you purchase Beating Adwords. It’s an ebook by the creators of Wealthy Affiliate. It was actually really helpful for me and I was able to learn a lot. I make over $90 per day in profits now thanks to what Beating Adwords taught me.

    I hope you don’t take this as a promotional comment. I’m honestly just trying to help. I have no relation to Beating Adwords, other than being a happy customer.

    P.S. – If you are going to try it out, search for it on Clickbank first and purchase it through your own affiliate link to save some money!

    Best of luck!

  11. Another great post. I subscribed to your rss feed your blog is very useful

  12. […] my entry into the affiliate marketing space….again.  There seems to be a number of people doing the same, but I am sure that I can succeed.  I have a monthly profit goal in mind that I want to […]

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